And mixed with the blood was a faint, chemical scent that had lingered in my nostrils since seven-forty-five:
*The sharp, synthetic odor of aerosolized nitroglycerin and cold mountain loam.
*
I closed my eyes.
The highway came back behind my retinas with the concussive violence of an incoming artillery shell:Browse Reference
Route 6, winding through the foothills between Golden and
Lakewood.
The early morning traffic had been thin—a gray river of commuters rushing down toward the Denver central business district.
I had been in the fast lane, practicing my opening hook for the ten-million-dollar **Apex Health Logistics** pitch deck: *”Scalability isn’t a spreadsheet metric, gentlemen; it’s an operational artery.”
*
Then, the sudden brake lights ahead.
Not an accident.
A silver Mercedes-Maybach S680—a half-million-dollar flagship sedan with diplomatic livery plates—had pulled onto the narrow gravel shoulder fifty yards past the Lookout Mountain exit.
Its hazard lights were blinking with a frantic, irregular frequency.
The driver’s door was thrown wide open.
A woman had stumbled out into the gravel.
She wasn’t an elderly, frail grandmother in an unbuttoned cardigan.
She was sixty, perhaps sixty-two, dressed in an immaculate, double-breasted navy cashmere pantsuit tailored with the architectural precision of Savile Row.
Her silver hair was drawn into a chiseled, military-grade chignon secured by
a five-inch antique horn hairpin.
She took three uncoordinated, spastic strides toward the traffic lane, her right hand clawing at the lapels of her jacket, her left arm hanging limp, her fingers convulsing.
She didn’t wave for help.
She looked directly into my windshield as my Honda approached at fifty-five miles per hour.
Her eyes were not the eyes of a panicked victim.
They were two unblinking, slate-gray discs of terrifying, predatory intelligence—staring straight through my glass, through my pupils, through the cheap tie around my neck, as if she were reading the serial numbers off my soul.
Then her knees dissolved.
She hit the crushed granite of the shoulder with a sickening, heavy *thud*, her forehead striking the steel guardrail pylon, her breath exploding from her chest in a thin, whistling, red-tinted plume of fine aerosolized spray.
I didn’t think about the pitch deck.
I didn’t think about Nick’s
\
eight-thirty deadline.
I didn’t think about the three-year non-compete clause in my employment contract.
I slammed the brakes of my Accord so hard the antilock calipers groaned against the rotors: *SCREEECH-PULL.
*
